


american petroliana

by theultimateburrito



Series: camp howling ground [1]
Category: Sleepaway (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Backstory, Coming Out, F/F, Gen, Gender Issues, Intense Female Friendship Misinterpreted As Romantic, Non-Linear Narrative, One-Sided Attraction, Sexuality Crisis, Summer Camp, dead-naming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theultimateburrito/pseuds/theultimateburrito
Summary: or: if they don't have your name on gas station souvenirs, take the gas station's name and run.
Relationships: Past Sinclair Sullivan/Jack (Freeform)
Series: camp howling ground [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918555
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6
Collections: Camp Howling Ground (Sleepaway 2020 campaign)





	american petroliana

**Author's Note:**

> cw for motion sickness and getting sick, to whom it may concern

Dad doesn’t have much to say as they drive away from camp. He tries, once, to ask how it was.

All nine weeks at Camp Howling Ground amount to a shrug.

“It’s ‘kay.” 

Which is a book report-perfect summary. 

He accepts the dead end for what it is, probably figured it wouldn’t amount to much when he turned down that road anyway. There’s just not much to say.

Which is fine, because Francine has even less that she wants to talk about. Instead she stares intently at the flashes of yellow on the shoulder of the road, dotted with the patchwork of tar swaying all along the stretch of country highway. If she looks anymore, she’s sure she’ll get sick but she doesn’t care. Maybe it’ll dredge up this god awful feeling in her gut, make it something tangible. An excuse to get out of the car instead of some sourceless churning at the bottom of her chest.

Besides, if she looks up she’ll see the blurring rush of woods as they grow thinner and thinner and thinner-- further and further away from camp and heartbreak and memories she doesn’t want to keep replaying. It’s like a CD player skipping when you bump it, having to exist in the brief silence before hearing a blip of that same line, over and over and

_“Over here!” Francine calls from the top of the Abandoned Stone Wall, one leg swinging on either side of it. “It’s not as tall on this part!”_

_Jack looks up at her, a coy smile twitching at her lips. It’s what she does when she’s trying to hide that she thinks Francine’s being stupid, that she thinks that’s cute. So she acts stupid an awful lot, just to draw out those dimples for a second-- around for a limited time only!_

__

__

_“You’re gonna fall!” Jack plays at concern like she’s not already laughing._

__

__

_“Catch me, then!” She swings her legs hard so her balance is off-kilter on purpose, swaying her shoulders in time to make it look more obvious, playful._

__

__

_Like clockwork Jack comes rushing over-- “Seriously, you’ll_ fall!” 

_Francine’s laughing, but Jack’s still laughing too so it’s fine._

_“My hero!”_

_Jack rolls her eyes and holds her hand out to Francine, who reads the letter of intent for what it is-- pulls her up, hands clasped together, a rush of heat crawling up her arm like fire, like magic for a moment. Francine stares at the friendship bracelet on Jack’s wrist, the one that matches hers, as she pivots onto the wall beside her, stares at it just to have something to look at that isn’t anything telling. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Jack’s mouth moving, telling her something, but she can’t really tell what it is._

_Maybe she should have listened more. Maybe it would have stopped her from_ \-- 

“That bad, huh?” 

Francine looks up, fast enough that her sweaty skin sticks against her knuckles in the motion. “I said it was fine, dad.” 

He’s quiet, quiet for long enough that she thinks the conversation’s passed. But whenever she looks over, she can see him chewing the inside of his lip, like he’s on the precipice of saying something. Her stomach churns over all the possibilities. 

It drops when he finally says, “Wasn’t a boy, was it?” 

She swallows down anything resembling a laugh so it rests right next to the pit in her gut. Get out. Stay there. 

“No.” 

“If it was a boy, I’ll--” 

“Seriously, it wasn’t.” She can already feel the shame stretching underneath her skin, pouring hot-cold down her face-- feeling the way that those icicle Christmas lights look. 

And he seems to accept that, too, but the question is worming through her, down her arm, making her fingers tap at her thigh like it’s a nerve pulled taught. It drags her attention down. There’s a tan line on her wrist that she can’t stop staring at. A friendship bracelet used to be there, the one she made with-- well, you know. For eight weeks she’d hook her thumb under it and rotate it around, and just like that it would calm her down. It was enough. 

She doesn’t think it would help now, even if it was on her wrist instead of tossed into the bushes just behind the Abandoned Stone Wall in a flurry of tears. 

God. 

She really is going to throw up. 

“Dad pull over-- up here.” 

He glances over quick, one big take before quickly pulling off the highway. Thankfully they’re at a turnoff and Francine can have the comfort of getting sick in a bathroom instead of in front of oncoming traffic. It’s single-stall so she stays inside for a little longer, just lingering. It’s meditative, in a weird way, elbow resting on the porcelain of the toilet seat and fist balled up under her chin. A real Charlie Brown moment.

That’s what this whole summer has been, she thinks, dropping her head to rest in the palm of her hand. One big Charlie Brown slow-motion football moment. 

Great. Fucking great. 

She peeks one eye open, her eyes had been 

_clenched shut, absolutely mortified. She can’t look at Jack, she can’t._

_“Frankie I’m sorry but,” Her voice trails off. ‘But’ is a million years long, stretching her heart out long and thin like a slapstick gag, waiting for it to snap back into her face. It’s all the space in the world to make her keenly aware of how known she is. How everyone will know her like this too, when the sound of the other shoe dropping echoes across camp. Everyone will_ know _she’s-- She clenches her eyes closed tighter. Francine can hear the way Jack kicks the toe of her shoe into the dirt, nervously taking chunks out of the grass. “I just don’t like you that way. I wouldn’t have teased you if I knew...”_

_“Yeah, it was...” She opens her eyes enough to glare at the ground, at the Sharpie scribbles across her Converse, at the heart that Jack wrote next to her name, smiling up at her like a shared secret. “It was dumb. Sorry.”_

_“Frankie, you’re--”_

_“It was a joke, anyway.”_

_Jack tenses then. Looks at her like she’s waiting for the punchline._

_“No it’s not,” she says, but it sounds more like testing the waters, just dipping your toe in._

_Francine wants to cry, but she doesn’t do that, never cries. Instead she gets mad, laughs at nothing, this hysterical thing rising higher and higher in her chest the more she thinks about everyone at camp being so_ proud _of her for coming out like that. That wasn’t what this was supposed to be._

_“Sure, like you’d know.”_

_She can see the way it freaks Jack out, like she’s something to be scared of. Makes sense, with all of this. It makes sense._

_“Frankie--”_

_“Don’t_ CALL ME _that!” Francine screams. “Get a sense of humor or **go**!”_

_Jack’s always been good at doing two things at once, so it makes sense that she can get mad and cry on top of it. She clenches her fists at her sides and yells at Francine, really lays into her. And that actually makes her feel better, in a way, makes her feel like the guilty twist in her gut is justified. Good, she thinks. The blame’s on me._

_It’s not Jack’s fault she can’t read a signal. The wires just got crossed._

She’s outside behind the gas station, now, not really trying to piece together how she got there. Her dad’s parked in the front and hasn’t come looking for her yet, so she sits cross-legged on the curb.

She wants to leave. Doesn’t matter where-- as long as no one knows her there. Her shoes squeak against the pavement as she kicks at it. She looks at all the doodles on her shoes, from friends who are braver than her, friends who are just _fine_ with gender and fine with who they like, and wonders why that can’t just be her. The vulnerability of acceptance itches at her like a stray thread. She wishes she could just grab at it and pull. 

Why is that so easy for them? 

Her attention catches on a little doodle of a turtle on the inner side of her Converse, in a green Sharpie that the craft counselor would only let _her_ use. 

_“It looks like you,” They said with a smile. Knowing._

She knows what they meant because it’s how she’s always felt-- hard on the outside, poking back into her shell at the first sign of someone understanding that there’s a softness within. A lot of her cabinmates were like that, too, and it felt good. Like they had common ground. But eventually they all seemed to grow out of it, more like hermit crabs outgrowing their shells and scuttling out into new ones. 

She drags her hand down her face. She doesn’t want to think about this. About camp, about how she spent the last of it pretending like nothing had even happened, that no one knew that she was. Bi, she thinks. Bi sounds right, comfortable as a word inside her head instead of a sound out loud. It should have stayed there. 

God she’s so embarrassing. She’s _so_ embarrassing. 

Immediately that thought is shoved out of her head when she looks up. Right smack-dab in front of her is a giant green dinosaur. It makes her laugh a little at how obvious it was, how _close_ it is. It’s always been there, hasn’t it? 

There, sitting on the curb, laughing at this stupid-looking green dinosaur with its face painted on all wrong, is the first time she’s actually _laughed_ in a full week. Nothing sarcastic, nothing to deflect someone asking if she’s alright. A real laugh.

“God,” she whispers, voice petering out. “ _Same_.”

It’s enough to get her to stand up, swing upward onto her feet and place a hand on the statue. Really, the dinosaur looks like the turtle on the side of her shoe, just without the shell, with a stronger tail. A real dopey looking thing. Well. Maybe less a perfect likeness and more… Aspirational. Like that could be _her_ dopey-looking face if she just kicked the shell off that turtle, scribbled harder over it with green layer-by-layer. 

Walking around it, one arm out for balance, bracing herself on the dinosaur’s snout, she keeps her eyes on her shoes and considers this. Until something else catches her eye. Stooping down, she peers at the lettering hidden on the other side of the statue. 

In bright red letters it says: **SINCLAIR**. 

Something sparks in her chest, like a fire, a vision. That could be you, a place where no one knows you. Just for you. It feels like a hand extended out to her in invitation.

That’s stupid, she thinks. 

It’s mine now, Sinclair thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> my friends and i have gotten way to into sleepaway, a ttrpg by jay dragon, and we've all been writing ficlets for our characters. we're gearing up to do the 2nd of 3 sessions and i'm buzzing with anticipation. mostly i wanted to post this just to make sleepaway an official tag, because it deserves the attention. 
> 
> thanks for reading, even if you have no idea what i'm talking about! mentions of fire are the "craft" i've chosen for sinclair (who is a character under the crafter playbook), which means that she can tap into magic by staring into open flames.


End file.
